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Lindsay + KevinTue, 16 Jan 2018 18:44:53 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3A month and a half in Iceland – part 1http://www.shoelessone.com/month-half-iceland-part-1/
http://www.shoelessone.com/month-half-iceland-part-1/#respondMon, 15 Jan 2018 05:06:07 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=1017Lindsay and I decided this past year to spend a summer somewhere new / interesting, and after some debate and consideration, we decided on Iceland. The decision to spend (ha?) the summer in Iceland was, as is often the case with us, decided in large part (and semi-ironically) based on cost. In particular the cost …

]]>Lindsay and I decided this past year to spend a summer somewhere new / interesting, and after some debate and consideration, we decided on Iceland.

The decision to spend (ha?) the summer in Iceland was, as is often the case with us, decided in large part (and semi-ironically) based on cost. In particular the cost of the flight through Wow Air. This is a fairly well known “deal” at this point but basically Wow Air had ~$300ish dollar flights out of Toronto direct to Reykjavik. Lindsay and I had been talking about going to Iceland for a while, and when we saw the cheap-ish tickets within our reach we did a quick search on AirBnB to make sure that an apartment was somewhat affordable (we found a few single rooms for ~900-1000 for a month… which ended up all being “fake”, but more on that later) and just YOLOed and bought the ticket.

So, we bought our tickets on Wow air, some time went by, and BAM we packed and drove from Chicago to Toronto via our parents in Michigan. Overall I’d say the 7 hour drive was worth saving a good chunk of money but it was a bit of a hassle (in particular on the way home!). My aunt / uncle let us leave our car at their house for the entire time we were in Iceland (6 weeks total), which was super nice (thank you guys!).

The flight was overall easy. Wow air is not exactly a super comfortable flight but honestly nothing particular memorably bad about it. Just like an uncomfortable bus that flys.

Arriving in Iceland was pretty exciting I’d say. We’d never been to Iceland before and didn’t REALLY know what to expect. I read a lot about practical issues like how the bus system works, SIM card options, the cheapest grocery stores, etc, but still didn’t really have a great feeling for what the airport would feel like. Overall I’d say Reykjavik felt small but nice. Does’t that just paint a picture!

I do have a single photo from the airport:

So, we grabbed our luggage, went through customs / immigration, went to the little coffee shop / convenience store in the airport to buy a few SIM cards for our phone(s), and then took a series of buses to get to our guesthouse.

We ended up having a SLIGHTLY confusing time getting to our apartment for one reason or another, we ended up going the wrong way on a bus and then had to walk a bit of extra distance and it was early enough in the AM there weren’t a ton of people around. It’s a bit strange, the ONLY time I had any communication problems AT ALL with people where people didn’t just immediately start speaking English was this first morning talking to bus drivers. Honestly if we had half a bit of experience or “feeling” for the city it would have been super easy for us to get to our apartment but as it was we were crunched for time because we were supposed to meet our host before they left for work so had somewhat of a limited window of time.

Now, previously I mentioned that it turns out the apartments we were looking at on airbnb in the 800-900 range ended up being “fake”, and this is true as far as I can tell. Maybe not “fake”, but they were listings that nobody responded too. A pretty classic “too good to be true” sort of thing it turned out. The reality is for a reasonably comfortable single room for a month we ended up spending closer to 1600 for a month. Not really too great, but luckily we live pretty frugal lives to make this sort of thing possible. The room we rented was with a woman named Birna. Birna is actually a professional tour guide, semi-retired. It’s a bit weird when you stay somewhere for an entire month, you really become housemates with a person and do things like eat dinner while they are watching TV, etc. Overall our time with Birna was very pleasant, although I’ll say that it’s somewhat hard to share a space with another person even when they are perfectly great.

Anyway, here is a very quick glimpse at what the apartment looked like:

More on our apartment / Birna in a bit, but for now, work. When we got to our apartment it was around 9am or so. We got our stuff situated and having not slept much we went to sleep for a few hours. I should say, I went to sleep a little less than 2 hours but for better or worse it was a working day! This entire trip, which I may not have yet said, was designed around one important concept: I didn’t want to miss or interrupt my normal work schedule. So it’s a bit crazy, but even driving to Toronto and flying to Iceland and all of it, I only missed part of a day of work. I even kept the same rough work schedule as I was in Chicago.

Anyway, I slept for a bit less than two hours and then started the hike to work. I rented a space at the Reykjavik Coworking Unit, which was actually supposed to have moved to a closer location but ended up being something like a 2+ mile walk each way. This isn’t a hugely long walk or anything, and I love walking, but when the hours i was working were roughly 1pm to 10:30 or 11pm. So when you’re leaving work at 11pm and are tired, and then you have to walk home two miles, it feels like a LONG walk. Honestly no complaints, I think there was probably a total of one or two nights when I REALLY felt like “this sucks”, but overall it just took a good chunk of time every day just going to and from work.

One small “lol”: the RCU shared an address with the Icelandic Penis Museum. So my first day I couldn’t find the door and I ended up having to go to the penis museum to find my office. If you put the address of the co-working space in google maps you’ll find the Iceland Penis Museum.

So the Reykjavik Coworking Unit was a great place to call home office for a month. It was actually even better because it was the first time I HAD a “real” office since I started working full time remote two years ago, and it has since inspired me to rent an office at a co-working spacing here in Chicago. Anyway, this is what the place looked like (btw, I’ve learned it’s since moved to a different location!)

(one sort of funny thing about this video: In it, you can briefly see some buses out the window in the background. Those buses / bus stop was were Lindsay and I were earlier that morning when had taken a wrong bus and ended up there. Just a few hours previous to walking BACK here, I had spent a good chunk of time walking around this very spot trying to get directions).

I met some really great people in this space, and the time chatting with the guys at the space was pretty awesome. If I had one regret about Iceland it’s that I never had the opportunity to hang out with the dudes at the office outside of work. They were all just really super cool, down to earth people who I have a feeling I’d have gotten along with very well if I was in Iceland for much longer. Also bonus, all of them were working on various games (VR, Unity, etc). Oh, we also shared this space with the Icelandic film festival organization / organizers, which was pretty cool. Not that I had many interactions with them, but it’s just always super cool IMO to stay somewhere longer than just a few weeks so you actually get to see real people working / hanging out / doing normal every day things. Sort of seeing behind the scenes of Iceland the tourist destination.

So that was day one basically. And honestly this walk to and from work as well as the time actually working was really how I spent most of my time for month one in Iceland. I’m not going to focus TOO much on this because at the end of the day talking about how I worked most of my waking moments in Iceland isn’t super exciting. And honestly not that colorful, because it was all pretty much the same! Overall for anybody who might be reading this thinking about doing the digital nomad thing in Iceland for a while, the internet was totally acceptable, I have a fair number of video / voice calls on google hangouts / zoom / etc and can’t say I really had a single issue.

So now I’m going to focus on the stuff we actually did in Iceland OTHER than work!

I’m going to split up the rest of this post into two sections:

The stuff we did while staying in Reykjavik outside of work

The stuff we did for two weeks while on vacation while driving around Iceland

The stuff we did while staying in Reykjavik outside of work

I’d say outside of work, the activities we did consisted of one of the following things:

Weekend trips outside of Reykjavik

Bathing / swimming in pools around the city

Grocery shopping

Eating hot dogs

Walking around the city

Grocery stores and eating hot dogs are not the most exciting things to think about perhaps, but they were a pretty big part of our time in Iceland to be honest. As anybody who knows Lindsay and me knows, we like to eat and we are frugal, so often times highlights of travel for us include going to grocery stores.

We went to, I think to MOST of the grocery stores in Reykjavik. This includes Costco, technically, although we tried to sign up for a membership and weren’t able to.

Our favorite grocery store overall was probably Kronan, with a close second being Bonus. Bonus is probably the most “famous” of the cheap-ish grocery stores, and it has some great deals, but the Kronan near our apartment was the nicest mix of good prices and high quality / selection. Here is a link on google maps to the specific location of the store. Anyway, Kronan is a chain of grocery stores much like Bonus.

One fun fact about Kronan is they sell sashimi grade salmon at this particular location (possibly others as well?). This is an amazing thing about living in a city for a month like we did, I actually spent some time researching the best place to get sashimi grade fish in Iceland, and in the end although there are a number of fish mongers / places that specifically just sell fresh fish, Kronan was the cheapest place and we made sushi a few times with the salmon there and it was great!

Despite loving Kronan, I’d say we went to Bonus as often if not more. There are more Bonuses, and they were generally more conveniently located when we were walking around the city. There was a Bonus on the way to work I’d go to fairly often to get something for lunch, generally something cheap like cup soup or something. Also we ate a LOT of these cheap little “_____ salad” things, where ______ is “salmon” or “egg” or “potato”, etc.

We ate a lot of pretty typical stuff, pasta, cereal, sandwiches, and when we wanted a very special treat, pylsur aka hot dogs. I’ll say that these hot dogs are pretty much the only thing we found that you can really eat out in Iceland that’s going to cost you ~$5. They are also famous. You can google “pylsur” and you’ll find a bunch of info, but I’d say I probably ate these hot dogs once every three days, at least.

Also, for color, here you can listen to the fairly typical night / morning, listening to a news station on the radio (Birna listened to this every day / night) and eating a hot dog before bed. Note how bright it is… I’m GUESSING this was around 11pm or so at night (?).

BONUS PHOTO: I forgot to mention, the whole “constant daylight during the summer” thing was pretty real. Walking home at 11pm at night and watching kids playing soccer outside was somewhat surreal / great. Here is a photo of Lindsay going to bed around 9 or 10pm (note the blings being closed):

So, other than eat hot dogs and go to grocery stores, Lindsay and I spent most of our other free time (and to some extent I’m speaking for myself here because Lindsay ran a lot and did other stuff when I was working) in Reykjavik walking to various baths / pools / hot springs.

Baths in Iceland are a pretty big deal in general, and we both love baths. As you may or may not know, even during the summer Iceland is generally cold-ish, which means pools are almost always heated. Which is pretty awesome. We did a bunch of research on pools before we came to Iceland and one of the first things we did is buy a pool pass for something like $70 that gave us something like 20 “swims”. We used the entire thing I think, plus purchased a few individual tickets, so if we do the math that means we went swimming in Reykjavik roughly 10 days out of 30. So that’s not every day, but it’s a lot! And to tell the truth, our FAVORITE place to swim was actually not a place that cost money at all. That’s right, ZERO MONEY!!

Now, photos are a bit weak here, because you can’t actually take photos in any of the public baths. Luckily, we have the internet which has photos of things, even those things you arne’t supposed to take photos of! Our local pool was called Vesturbæjarlaug and you can see some photos and such on google photos here, if you care. Basically though what a fairly typical routine was for us was waking up around 8:30 or 9 (generally pretty slow days to be honest), taking a shower, then walking to Vesturbæjarlaug. Generally get there around 9:30 or 10am. Then we would swipe in, go to our respective locker rooms. Then pretty standard for public baths: strip naked, take a shower naked (important requirement!), then put your bathing suit on and go to the pool area.

I wish I could say I was swimming laps and stuff, but honestly most days I would just lay in the shallow pool and listen to people around me chatting (normally in Icelandic which I didn’t understand for obvious reasons). Lindsay would sometimes swim laps then come lay with me, or just lay with me. Vesturbæjarlaug had a great (and fairly typical) shallow area that allowed you to lay and support your head out of the water, and just relax. I’d practice holding my breath, and basically just sit there for an hour or two talking with lindsay and hanging out.

Then, we’d get up, shower / clean off, and head in to work! Stop at Bonus on the walk to work to get some food for lunch / dinner and that was one of the most common public pool experiences.

Lindsay would often spend her days after I left the pool swimming more, or exploring the city, or going to coffee shops to plan the next portion of our trip outside of work. I feel pretty lucky when I think about how well this system worked. I was “lazy” in that although I was working, Lindsay was also often working to plan out things for us to do on the weekend or provide a menu of options for us to talk through at night. Pretty lucky!

All in all, we went to I think 3 or 4 different pools while in Reykjavik. Outside of Reykjavik we went to quite a few more pools / baths, but more on that in a second. Like I said, there are the public baths that require payment, and then there are other public baths that do not. Probably my FAVORITE bath in Reykjavik was actually called “Nauthólsvík Beach” aka the manmade geothermal beach somewhat near the university and airport. This place doesn’t have amazon reviews if you look at Trip Advisor or similar, and honestly if you’re only in Reykjavik for a few days there may be better uses of your time, BUT for us it was an awesome place to come visit. It was a nice walk from home here, then it was nice to relax outside in the hot pool and look out at the water (not a beautiful ocean view or anything, but still nice to be outside!). Plus swimming in the actual cold water was really nice too.

(these photos are at Laugardalslaug, which is one of the larger if not largest (?) public pools in Iceland. If you go to Reykjavik and want to go to ONE pool, this might be the one to go to).

OK, so that’s pools / swimming.

Our first weekend in Iceland we took a series of buses to get to a hike that promised a hot spring at the end. The name of the hike / the area we hiked was called Reykjadalur. It wasa bit of a trek to actually get to the hiking spot but was well worth the hike:

To be honest there are SO many beautiful photos of Iceland I sort of feel like “meh” posting them just because it feels a bit like, “yeah, Iceland is photogenic, cool.” So here is a photo of Lindsay carbo-loading on the hike:

Ikea! This might sound lame, and I guess in a way it was, but we love walking, and at this point in our trip (after two weeks in Reykjavik) I was super interested in checking out Costco, which is a huge deal in Iceland. The plan was to go to Ikea and get lunch (and compare Iceland Ikea food with US Ikea food), then head to Costco and see if we could sign up for a Costco membership in Iceland. Apparently if you have a US Costco membership you can got Costco in Iceland, but we didn’t have one. We thought it might be a cool and semi-useful souvenir to get a Costco membership in Iceland (plus allow us to buy some cheap / bulk food for our eventual 2 week camping trip). It turns out that at least when we went, the customer service person at the counter told us that we couldn’t sign up for a membership without a particular piece of paperwork / identification / documentation that I believe establishes that you live in Iceland essentially. Oh well.

I was still able to enjoy a wonderful lunch at Ikea and I go no less than FIVE drinks to celebrate the long walk:

Of particular note is the “beer” – in Iceland you can only but alcohol at a particular government sanctioned store that has very limited hours (I actually never made it to one of these stores, which is a bit of a bummer / missed experience). Anyway you CAN sell “beer” as long as the alcohol content is less than 2.25%. So that’s what I was drinking there.

Another weekend we decided to do the “golden circle”, which is Þingvellir National Park, the Geysir Geothermal Area, and Gullfoss waterfall. We also added Gamla Laugin aka the “secret lagoon” to the trip, which looked something like

I remember this secret lagoon stop particularly well because there was some American dude going on and on about how Trump was great and it was a heated argument between him and a guy with a European accent and was frustrating to listen to while in such a beautiful spot.

To do the golden circle tour we ended up renting a car for like 60 bucks for the entire weekend and just doing the tour ourselves. Honestly, it was worth doing overall (though I’d basically totally skip Gyser or at least plan 15 minutes tops just to say you saw it) but compared to the rest of Iceland the Golden Circle stuff was certainly not my favorite. Gullfoss was probably the most impressive part of the attractions we saw, just because it felt like such an incredibly powerful waterfall.

Around this area the famous scuba diving / snorkeling place is, which we didn’t do because it’s so expensive, and honestly it seemed a bit disappointing. Still the water around here was very beautiful.

So, other weekend trips.. Honestly some of the details are a bit fuzzy at this point, but one day I know we went on a nice hike just outside of Reykjavik (I think this was actually the weekend we rented the car for the golden circle).

One particularly terrible Friday night we decided we’d go out to a bar and try to experience the night life in Reykjavik (normally it was too expensive to go out so we didn’t, but we decided at least one night to stay up late and do the night-life party thing). As I was leaving work Lindsay gave me some whisky, which turned out to be a lot more whisky than I had really thought… then we went to Kikis, a pretty great gay gar in Reykjavik, and I ended up drinking perhaps 3 beers. Honestly, I didn’t drink THAT much, but next thing I know I was feeling miserable and we ended up walking until almost 2 in the morning around the city hoping that I would stop spinning… Anyway suffice to say it was a terrible night and I seriously regretted my actions.

We somehow killed Birna’s over and also burned / melted her microwave and also broke her measuring cup. This caused some stress. Birna’s son and daughter in law + child came to visit, which was actually really nice as they were super cool / friendly (although the house was even more cramped!).

I think I might call this a blog post for now and make another post for the two weeks we spent camping around Iceland.

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/month-half-iceland-part-1/feed/0A summer in Austin (and Chicago)http://www.shoelessone.com/summer-austin-chicago/
http://www.shoelessone.com/summer-austin-chicago/#respondThu, 21 Sep 2017 00:51:56 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=927Well it’s been awhile since I’ve updated the ol’ blog. Over a year Over TWO years. So I’ll recap the past events, starting at the previous blog post: We ate the ramen for dinner, and had some leftovers that we took to Lindsay’s house. The leftovers were perhaps more disappointing then the original meal. I …

]]>Well it’s been awhile since I’ve updated the ol’ blog. Over a year Over TWO years. So I’ll recap the past events, starting at the previous blog post:

We ate the ramen for dinner, and had some leftovers that we took to Lindsay’s house. The leftovers were perhaps more disappointing then the original meal. I have yet to attempt ramen again since this last attempt but recently have begun the search for bones to give it another shot.

Lindsay and I went apartment hunting and ended up finding a great apartment in Chicago. The apartment itself was perhaps a bit odd at times, and certainly rough around the edges (exposed insulation in areas, partially pained ceiling, walls that crumble when you touch them).

We moved to Chicago, Lindsay got a job at a great middle school, and I decided to start back at ID working remotely. We met a bunch of great new friends, including friends through a cooking community, and some very wonderful people we share the house / apartment with.

We decided to go to Austin, TX for a month during the summer (that’s where we are currently at – that’s where we were at when I started this blog post… which is sad, because that was the summer, and now it’s winter that’s where we were over a year ago. We’ve since moved to a different apartment in Chicago, and it’s now the end of the NEXT summer from when I started this blog post!!).

We ended up with rat issues in our apartment on Palmer St… we dealt with them for quite a few months, but eventually decided we should move. The rats were in the walls, and I would wake up often times in the middle of the night and pound on the walls to get them to be quiet. Also, the rats ate some of our clothing INSIDE of our bedroom, so at some point the rats were getting inside the apartment itself.

We ended up moving to a new wonderful apartment in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago

That’s the basic life update for our own memories, but I’d like to spend a tiny bit more time writing about our time in Austin as it was a wonderful summer and I feel like it would be sad to not capture some of the memories from the trip for the future. Already many details are going to be lost, but I’m going to just take a stab at it, as they say. And by “they” I mean.

So, what can I say about the summer in Austin..

First was the planning. To be honest, I don’t recall exactly how we decided on Austin I guess Kyle, Lindsay’s brothers, visited a number of times while living in Texas and thought we might like it so made the initial recommendation (THANKS KYLE!), I think it was in large part because we had heard good things about it, and perhaps also because Nick lived in the area. We had considered New Orleans, and before that Vancouver and Norther California (Jenner, Salt Point, etc). At the end of the day, Austin was doable without our price range, so we went with that. It was also a somewhat easy drivable distance (16, 17 hours or so) for a weekend.

So we packed up our car and drove off. The plan (at least as I can remember it at this point!) was:

The Basic plan

Drive to Houston and hang out with Nick for a few days or so

Take a few days off during that period and drive to New Orleans with Nick to do that thing

Drive back to Houston for another few days, then leave for Austin (Nick actually had to travel for work as I recall, so I think we might have actually dropped him off in New Orleans and driven his car back to Houston without him

Hang out in Austin for a month

Have some friends visit us

Drive home and deal with the previously mentioned rat infestation in our apartment

For anybody wondering, I actually only took two days of vacation during this entire summer. There was sadly plenty of stress and solid 45 hour work weeks throughout this period, but I won’t be dwelling on this too much in this post! The reality is it’s work that makes this possible, so I’m grateful to have a job! Also teaching seems like a pretty good job if you want to do this sort of thing.

Driving to Houston

The trip was painless and like all road trips I’ve been on, great. I believe we split the driving up over two, possibly three days (sadly I forget at this point… we may have started on a Friday night to help break up the trip). We made a few stops along the way, trying to make the most of the trip (which was a success).

First, we stopped in Memphis, Tennessee. We were here for all of 30 minutes probably, just passing through, but we did stop at the farmers market, which was to be perfectly honest fairly typical. We didn’t buy anything, and took turns walking through because it was super hot so we couldn’t leave Sai in the car, but also couldn’t bring her into the farmers market. I think there was a nearby tree that we took turns sitting under.

We don’t have a photo, but we also did a small tour of Memphis and visiting the location where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.

We also stopped at a hotel the first night, which is fairly atypical for us, but it was not much more expensive than camping, plus there was a pool and free breakfast. Lindsay had a chance to meet her first official Trump supporter on this trip at the hotel parking lot. Apparently a nice guy, and from what I recall was going to take care of his brothers estate.

Next stop was Little Rock. As you might expect we stopped at the High School, walked around a bit, and also visited a nearby museum.

Sai and Lindsay checkout out the school.

We also stopped on our way at a place called Naaman’s on our way and got the first of what would be quite a bit o

Houston

Eventually (after 17 hours) we made it to Nick’s place in Houston. Nick’s apartment was, in my opinion, really nice.

We had an awesome time in Houston hanging out with Nick for the better part of a week.

I sadly don’t have a ton of photos from Houston, but we did a lot of stuff. We went to a bunch of really cool / interesting bars (one to watch a soccer game and lay in hammocks, one to watch the recording of a podcast that we somehow missed or was too busy for us to get in (but Lindsay found Buffalo Trace instead), one to hang outside in a bar near Nick’s house, etc, etc), plus went on some great walks (terrible picture below is inside a great park near Nick’s house), got some great food / BBQ, watched some great TV, and in general just had an awesome time seeing Nick and hanging out doing hanging out stuff.

I must say that Houston was a lot cooler than I thought it might be. There were a few really great grocery stores that I would have been super happy to have near me, and one of the greatest things was (as cliche as this is) the size of so many of the venues we went to. It really felt like there was a lot of space. A lot of outdoor bars that felt like you were basically standing in a really hip field in the middle of a big city. A++ would visit again.

New Orleans

A small note: typing all of this after a year has passed, is pretty crazy. I feel so lucky / jealous of myself, as stupid as this sounds, to have done such a great trip with so many fun parts. Note to self: keep doing this stuff always

I believe I took a Friday, possibly a Thursday AND Friday off to go to New Orleans with Nick and Lindsay and Sai. The drive is short-ish (5.25ish hours), and was once again a great time just to hang out and chat with Nick.

This picture is of the Raising Cane’s menu. I’d never heard of this fastfood chain before, but I must say it is now one of my favorites. There is one in Chicago and I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Nick drove most of the way, and Lindsay did some driving as well I think.

New Orleans was really awesome. I wish I could think of some more colorful / expressive way to put this. But really, it was like a dream, especially looking back on it. We stayed in what I believe was the “Magazine District”, or near that, in a small house. The feel of the incredibly hot sun is something I surprisingly really enjoyed, the slowness of people around, all if it was really great. We stayed in an AirBnB, which was actually a bit dirty when we got there because I guess they forgot to clean it or something, but it was a yolo situation and not a big deal (to be honest the only reason I even mention it here is for historical accuracy). We’ve actually talked about moving to New Orleans since coming home, and living in a house like that. I don’t think we really would, but it’s a pretty magical / special place I’d say.

The first night we didn’t do a ton, but went out and ate a po boy at a local bar, plus watched silence of the lambs (IIRC).

There Lindsay and Nick are doing the RuPaul arm at our New Orleans home on our first morning.

We ate donuts at a cool local donut shop. We ate oysters at some place that had cheap happy hour oysters. We got beignets and coffee at Cafe Du Monde, walked around the french quarter or whatever it’s called. We went on a ‘gater tour, and I said “get them gaters!” a bunch.

We also did a self guided tour of a lot of the historical places from the big Katrina flood. Not very exciting pictures (sadly, none of these are!), but just for historical purposes you can see in some of these photos the significant places the levees were broke / damaged, and some of the markings still on the houses where people searched for bodies and marked the houses with spray paint to signify which houses had been searched.

Really I’d say we did about everything I would have wanted to do in New Orleans and more. The feeling of the place, as I mentioned, was unique and special. Actually, one thing we didn’t do, and one of the great things in my life I’ve missed (thanks Lindsay and Nick!), is visiting the WW2 museum. One of the top tourist attractions in New Orleans, and I happen to be super interested in WW2 history, and we never went. Other friends who have gone said it’s amazing. I’m not joking when I say I might visit New Orleans again sometimes just to visit this museum. Oh well.

Back to Houston

Eventually we dropped Nick off at an airport in New Orleans (he had to fly somewhere for work and just left straight from New Orleans), and we drove back to Houston. We stayed at Nick’s place for a few more nights until mid-week (thanks Nick!) when our month long airbnb rental started in Austin. We didn’t do a ton in Houston while Nick was gone, work was fairly stressful for me during this period (actually, this entire period!) so I worked fairly long hours. I did work one great day from an awesome coffee shop near Nick’s (picture below) called Toot Sweet. Lindsay and I went for a run one day and almost died. Lindsay ran a few more days by herself because she is much tougher than I am.

(I spent most of my time sitting at that table on the right actually)

Austin, finally

So, finally we get to Austin! Check-in was painless-ish, we just had to grab a key from a mailbox somewhere and bam! We were in. The apartment was “interesting” I’d say. Which sounds like a shitty / snobby way of say “not very nice”, but that’s not really what I mean. I guess it wasn’t super nice, but also it was just different from most apartments you might find in the mid-west, or even California for that matter. The floor was all older tile, and there was a washing machine and dryer in the living room. The outside was super green / lush / beautiful though (see video / photos below!

Not a great photo, but this table is where I spent a good chunk of my waking hours working!

Here is the guest bedroom aka the livingroom aka where you do the laundry aka the kitchen

And the other part of the guest bedroom aka kitchen aka where you do the drying part of the laundry

Our kitchen table / dinner, with work laptop likely just closed for the dinner hour. One thing memorable about this meal, after dishing out this delicious mac and cheese with leftover brisket, 10 minutes later I had eaten my first helping (what a weird word) and went to get more from the pan on the counter, and there was a cockroach in it! No joke, in 10 minutes a cockrock managed to come out of somewhere (I suspect the cabinet where the dishes were stored) and climb into the pan of food. I don’t know how, it was a sauce pan with sheer stainless steel walls, but somehow it happened! The point is, there were quite a few small little cockroaches in this apartment. Honestly it wasn’t really a problem, though I do remember being annoyed at this particular time.

So that’s a rough introduction to our apartment in Austin. Now, as for what we did in Austin, I’d say that can be broken down into percentages as follows (ignoring sleeping and work, which was actually a majority of the time actually):

5% making iced coffee and yogurt

35% swimming

40% local activities / walking / exploring

5% watched movies at Alamo Drafthouse

10% eating brisket or working to that end

5% hanging out with friends

Making ice coffee and yogurt

This might sound silly, but when I think back about our trip to Austin, I think about Lindsay and my dedication and strict adherence to the scientific process to making iced coffee. Austin was hot, and although we had window air conditioning units that made the apartment totally comfortable and pleasant, it was still nice in the morning to wake up and have iced coffee. Being frugal people, and living in Austin for a month, we decided to make iced coffee with a bunch of different types of coffee / ratios origins / etc. I guess this was like a hobby for us while we were there, and also something we did that was fun and filled our extra time.

We went to a bunch of different stores to buy coffee, and bought coffee in bulk and ground it ourselves generally. I’d guess over the month we probably tried 7-10 different types of beans, which is quite a bit really, making ice coffee every few days. I enjoy having the summers with Lindsay in general, but the ice coffee in the morning thing, hanging out at the kitchen table together while I worked, was pretty nice. I’m generally super jealous (and sometimes bitter!) about Lindsay having the summers off, but it’s very nice for me also to see her / hang out with her more, even if it’s during stressful work periods.

Not picture is yogurt making. We made a bunch of yogurt (using the crockpot method). Nothing super fancy or anything, but it’s a thing we did. We had yogurt most mornings for breakfast.

Swimming

Swimming, or swimming related activities, made up a good chunk of our summer in Austin (at least of the time not spent working or sleeping). Most days during work we’d spend lunch swimming laps at the swimming pool. Actually I didn’t normally swim laps, just a few, I normally would just practice breathholding or just swim around without any real purpose, just enjoying the water. Lindsay swam laps though. So that was lunch.

The BIG swimming activity that we did about half of the week, is going to various swimming holes. For anybody not familiar with Austin, there are a ton of places to go swimming, in the city as well as outside of the city. Inside of the city there are a bunch of free public pools, but there is also Barton Springs, which is a very crisp / cool natural pool. It’s huge, and probably the most “iconic” swimming spot in Austin (I’d guess).

Barton Springs is a place we went perhaps 3 or 4 times, so not a ton. It’s free after a certain point in the night, so we went at night a few times, then during the day once or twice with friends who visited. BUT, the reality is the place we REALLY went a bunch is various swimming holes along the Barton Creek Greenbelt. This is basically an 8 mile stretch of a river / stream that has hiking trails alongside it. Quite a few nights every week Lindsay and I would drive to a parking spot along the Greenbelt right after work ended, go for a one or two mile hike to a swimming hole, and go swimming / relax. There are basically parts of the river that are more ideal for swimming, with deeper water or little holes in the rock that you can lay in, etc, and these spots are what I refer to as “swimming holes.” On the weekend if you go during the busy periods, there will be TONS of people swimming and listening to music and dogs running around in the water and having a great ol’ time. Lindsay and I would bring Sai and just very much enjoy the cool water on a hot day.

The thing that made this most cool is just how accessible the Greenbelt is. Leave work at 6, 10 minute drive and you’re a mile hike away from an idyllic swimming spot with tons of people having an awesome time. This was a big highlight of the entire time in Austin, and one of the things I often think about and miss about Austin.

Local activities

One of the best things about being in a totally new city for a full month is that you have enough time to explore quite a bit and see a lot more than you would if you were just there for a few days, but you also aren’t there long enough to get totally bored with things. You know you’re only there temporarily, and won’t always have an opportunity to do things, so everything feels special and you feel motivated to experience things because you won’t have the chance.

With this in mind, we did a lot of great stuff. Here are some examples

I went to a Laravel meetup (programming stuff)

Lindsay and I went to a movie in the park

We watched the fireworks on the 4th of July

We went to book stores and Lindsay read a ton of books for school

I went to all of the top rated donut places in all of Austin to try them all. I’m serious, I probably went to 7 or 8 different donut places, some of them even outside of Austin.

We went to the best grocery stores to check them out (including of course the Whole Foods mothership store)

We went bat watching under that bat bridge

We went to the state capital building and did a guided tour

I played a fair amount of Pokemon (it was a new thing at the time). This is of some interest because the number of people playing Pokemon in public parks was insane. There were a few days when we’d be walking around at night and there would be what felt like a hundred people hanging out playing pokemon, and everybody you’d see walking around was playing pokemon, etc. Crazy!

We went to a shakespeare play where the actors drink and at least act drunk / possibly are slightly drunk

We walked, a lot. There are tons of cool little streets and neighborhoods and outdoor food stalls and stuff like that in Austin. We spent a decent chunk of time walking around to a lot of these, just in the spirit of exploring the city and checking things out. I particularly enjoy this type of thing when I’m in a new city because I feel like most people don’t get the opportunity to explore in this sort of way. Maybe we don’t see a ton of interesting things on a 3 or 4 hour Sunday walk, but we really get to see the city!

Not really a local activity but we watched the OJ documentary and also a few old black and white films at home

Went to a corndog eating competition

Flew to New Jersey for work – also not really a local activity but where else am I supposed to stick this memory so I don’t forget it!?

Went on a few hikes unrelated to swimming

So yeah, we did a lot of just random exploring type things, “normal” stuff that people do in the city, etc. Lots of walking!

Movies at Alamo Drafthouse

So there is only so much to say about this, but basically Alamo Drafthouse is a chain of movie theaters in Austin (and maybe outside of Austin?). We went to at least two of them, possibly three, and we went fairly often. Why exactly? Mainly because the theater near our apartment was awesome. It’s tough to say exactly why, but some theaters seem to have a good soul, and I think we felt like this theater did. Comfortable seats, reasonably priced tickets, movie events with cheap tickets for more indy / art films. A nice system for order food and beer at your seat. Etc. Plus, as I mentioned and as you probably know, Austin is hot as hell in the summer and so going to watch a movie on a Saturday night after a long day of swimming and walking around Austin was awesome. I’m guessing we saw four or five movies over the month in Austin, which is WAY more than we’d normally see anywhere else we’ve lived. Anyway, this theater chain is one of the things I probably miss most about Austin in the “businesses” category.

Edit: Lindsay reminded me we saw Tickled and that was a pretty interesting movie / documentary, highly recommend you check it out!

Eating brisket or working to that end

It’s a cliche, but when you’re somewhere for a month it’s the perfect amount of time to both embrace the cliche but also experience it to the point of understanding more than just a single BBQ place. That might not make sense.

So we ate a lot of Brisket. Not an INSANE amount or anything, but I’d say we had brisket a good 7 days out of one month in Texas. A BIG part of the reason we ate so much is because there was a food truck very close to our apartment that gave away FREE food on Sunday’s with a 10 dollar bar tab. So Lindsay and I would both go, I’d drink two beers and Lindsay would have a bloody mary or something, then we’d get awesome, quality brisket.

Same place, different day, different free food

We also sometimes went and got food at this food truck but paid for it.

Sort of like coffee, we made brisket a piece of our experience in Austin, so although I’m generally against waiting in line to buy food when you can probably go somewhere else without a line and get food just as good, we decided to wake up semi early one day to go to Franklin’s (the most famous BBQ place in Austin, if not Texas, if not the US, if not hte world ?), but as luck would have it (and I really do feel lucky!) it was closed for vacation or something along htose lines.

… so we went to some other near by place that was BYOB and hung out until opening reading and drinking beer and playing cribbage until it opened.

Overall, brisket is good, and we enjoyed doing the cliche thing and eating it in Austin. Since then we’ve had BBQ in Chicago that was probably just about as good, but maybe not quite!

Hanging out with friends

Note to self: I should write shorter blog posts, but I now see why I was putting off writing this for over a year.

Last but not least, we hung out with some great friends in Austin.

Our great friend Elizabeth (aka “E”) came to visit for a few days, which was awesome. Lindsay and E went to a restaurant / bar that was apparently OK but had a beautiful view. We also went to Barton Springs, and a place to get brunch that had a bear.

(the bear wasn’t all that special, just something I remembered about the place and happened to have a photo of!)

My dear friend Nick also came from Houston for a weekend to hang out, which was really fun. We did a lot of the same things, eating food, going to the Greenbelt to go swimming, playing pokemon. I recall going to a donut shop that gave you extra donuts / physical goods / perks for having certain levels in pokemon. Nick got a lot of free stuff. Sadly, I have no photos. Oh! We also almost got breakfast tacos once. For my own memories I mention this. One day we went to the greenbelt to go swimming, and to get breakfast tacos, which I love. We wait in line at this taco truck, then right when we get up to the window, BAM, they stopped serving breakfast tacos! I was crushed!

the end

So that was Austin! Eventually we packed up and drove home. The drive home was less eventful, though we did stop in a hotel that had a swimming pool. There were a million younger teenagers in the pool, which is what we remember. Plus it hadn’t been cleaned in a while, so was full of leaves, and the lights didn’t work around the pool so it seemed very seedy, but it was super refreshing after a long day of driving! (and cheap).

We got back to Chicago, work got even more stressful, we moved from our first Chicago apartment on Palmer to our new apartment (where I’m currently typing this from) on Whipple, and starting thinking about what we wanted to do next year! (spoiler: Iceland).

I feel unbelievably lucky to have been able to do this trip. I really couldn’t be more appreciative to all of the people in my life who have together shaped my life into what it is to allow me to do this sort of thing, and to have such a great compatible partner as Lindsay to do these things with.

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/summer-austin-chicago/feed/0Tonkotsu Ramen Attempt One: Not Very Porkyhttp://www.shoelessone.com/tonkotsu-ramen-attempt-one-not-very-porky/
http://www.shoelessone.com/tonkotsu-ramen-attempt-one-not-very-porky/#respondSun, 31 May 2015 22:33:40 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=907Well, a small break from the past year of travel style blog posts. While traveling through Japan, Lindsay and I really fell in love with Ramen and decided that on the top of the “things to do when we’re home” bucket list we’d put “make real-ass ramen.” I want to take a second to point …

While traveling through Japan, Lindsay and I really fell in love with Ramen and decided that on the top of the “things to do when we’re home” bucket list we’d put “make real-ass ramen.” I want to take a second to point out that this was very much a team effort, though I may have spent a bit more time reading/researching/asking questions about what recipe to follow, which steps to follow, etc. But the point is, this was a team activity, even if I don’t write it up as such.

There is a great subreddit that has a large number of really useful posts about ramen, and in particular there is a guy, /u/ramen_lord who was really really helpful in terms of choosing a recipe, picking out ingredients, etc. We ended up following this very long, very well written, and very detailed recipe, and we created all of the individual ingredients from scratch.

This blog post I hope will serve as notes for my future self on how to improve the ramen, and perhaps interesting for somebody who wants to make ramen themselves.

The type of ramen we are making is called tonkotsu ramen. This is a very thick ramen, which is basically made from boiling some combination of pork bones to get a thick, rich, porky broth.

Shopping for ingredients

We started the ramen by first shopping for all of our ingredients. We are currently in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the Japanese grocery store selection is pretty small. In fact, there are exactly zero Japanese grocery stores, although there is one, Asian Delight, that sells quite a few Japanese ingredients. I was told that Asian Delight was a Japanese grocery store actually, but when I went there the selection was pretty limited. We did manage to purchase some (Chinese, and they didn’t taste the same/good) pickled bamboo shoots, as well as mirin and sake for the chashu (pork) and the soft boiled/marinated custard eggs (ajitsuke tamago).

The most critical part of the ramen is the broth, and this particular recipe called for a LOT of pork bones (femur) as well as chicken feet. I think I purchased something like 8 pounds of pork femur bones, 4 points of chicken feet, and 4 pounds of chicken wings/parts. Anyway, the best place I found to do this was at a Vietnamese grocery store (Kim Nhung Superstore for anybody in Grand Rapids). The femur bones I purchased were not super beautiful like you see in photos, but they were what I could find in such volume. I actually called a number of butchers and I was surprised to find that while they had femurs, they only had a few on hand, many of them they got rid of or sold to other vendors for various purposes. I wonder (?) at the end of the day if the reason our broth didn’t turn out so well is because of the bones that I had (again, I emphasize the ?).

The chicken feet I purchased were very nice, clean, beautiful. I was actually surprised at the quality.

I also purchased a 3 pound piece of pork belly. The pork belly I was also really pleased. It was flat, and probably the perfect thickness for the ramen style chashu. The pork belly had the skin on and I chose to remove it, which I believe was the right choice. Just an FYI, I went back the same store a week later to buy MORE pork belly for a different project and the pork belly was not nearly as nice. The pieces were thicker and narrower, and I noticed a fairly strong “barn” smell that wasn’t there before.

I decided (against Lindsay’s request I might add!) to make the noodles from scratch. I followed the ramen_lord recipe linked to above, and used baked-baking soda to make the noodles. I’d say they turned out very well, although I was surprised just how alkaline the noodles were. I didn’t taste the alkaline when we were eating, but when I tested a noodle on it’s own I very much noticed it! I did purchase King Arthur bread flower as well as the (insanely expensive around here) wheat gluten/protein. I used my kitchen scale to measure everything.

We also bought a fine mesh strainer for skimming the scum off the top of the stock pot, and a noodle cooking mesh/net/thing so we could cook single portions of noodles at a time (I like this better then making them all at once as it gets too crazy I think!). These things we bought at a different Vietnamese market in GR (A Dong).

Cooking – Broth

We decided to start making the broth on Friday afternoon. The plan was to actually eat the ramen on Saturday evening, but we wanted a day to start so that, hopefully, Saturday we could focus on making the other ingredients/toppings. This turned out to be a pretty big mistake as we didn’t really truly get started boiling until around 4:30 PM. The goal was to boil the broth AT LEAST 10 hours, which meant I was going to have to shut the broth off around 2:30 AM.

Anyway, here are the pork bones before I started blanching them. Note that this stock pot ended up not being large enough and I had to use a pot around twice as large to fit the pork, chicken feet, and chicken wings.

Here is the water of the bones right after I added water and put it on the stove to boil.

Meanwhile, I started chopping toes off of chicken feet, per the directions. This took a bit longer then I would have expected, but wasn’t too hard. I have a new respect for chickens though after doing this. Their feet are pretty complex and interesting little things.

Lots of chicken toes

Meanwhile, I started to get some scum (yaaa!!) on the top of the pork bones, which I skimmed off.

Eventually the scum really started to come up and I was removing more every 30 seconds to a minute

Until eventually you could see that the broth was getting a bit more clear and scum was forming more slowly (the spoon is full in this photo but you can see not as much scum is on the surface – well, you sort of have to trust me I guess :))

I also blanched/cleaned the chicken feet, though per directions (and my experience seemed to confirm this) for much less. I think I boiled the feet for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes tops, but nothing really came to the surface. I at least felt better knowing that the feet were “clean.”

I boiled the pork bones for quite a bit longer. I’d say closer to 45 minutes, maybe even a bit longer, before I really felt like nothing else was floating to the top.

After I dumped out the water from the pork bones I went through the bones one by one to remove any extra brown stuff sticking to them, any blog or anything else that didn’t seem like it should be there or like I’d prefer not to eat it. This didn’t take too long, but long enough (part of the reason I didn’t get started truly boiling until later in the day).

This photo is of the bones back in the pot, post cleaning, but prior to adding the chicken feet or wings. It’s probably worth pointing out that these bones might not look like they are “supposed” to look, and anybody reading this or looking at the photos that can tell me if the bones look like they aren’t ideal in terms of what types of bones/what types of femurs they are, I’d love to hear! I think there might be a bit more meat on these bones then I’d have liked.

Cooking – Eggs

Sometime around the time or perhaps during my broth cooking, Lindsay made the eggs for the ramen. This is pretty standard, she put the eggs in boiling water for around 6:45-7:00 minutes, after which she put them directly in ice water to cool them down. I’d say the cooking time was PERFECT. I had experimented with different times the day before, from 6:00 to 7:00 in 15 second intervals and all of the eggs were too raw, at least for my preferences, up until the 7 minute mark. Possibly because of the size of the eggs (these are “large” eggs, though in my experience the size of a “large” egg can vary quite a bit!).

The sauce is a mix of mirin and soy sauce, roughly 50/50. Also some green onions.

Here are all of our eggs in one basket (LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLHAHAHA!!!!111).

Next day…

Cooking – Chashu

I made the pork/chashu the next day, starting in the morning first thing. Side note: I think I spent about 10 hours making this recipe (including all ingredients).

I started by removing the skin from the pork belly.

I then took off a bit of the pork so that I could easily roll the pork. It’s probably stupid, but I far far far prefer the pork to be rolled. In Japan I feel like the large, large majority of ramen that you eat has rolled pork. Given I don’t know that much about ramen in reality, we ate at probably 16 or so different ramen places in Japan and I’d say at least 75% had rolled pork. It’s not because I think it tastes different (probably), I just like the aesthetic I think.

(I used cheap cotton twine (100% cotton, I checked and tested) from the Vietnamese market, but it worked well)

After cutting/trimming and rolling the pork I used this very cast iron pan..

To sear the pork. I used a bit of vegetable oil and made sure the pan was very hot before starting.

After a good sear I started basting the meat. I did this for longer then I probably needed to, but after the sort of unsatisfying pork broth work (basically just watching and adding a bit of water every once in a while). The basting liquid was ~ 1/2 cup sake (which I used first to deglaze the pan), 1/2 cup mirin, 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/2-1 cup of water (a bit less then the recipe called for), and a tablespoon or so of granulated sugar. ramen_lord, if you are reading this, I tasted this and it was interesting and I didn’t want to add TOO much sugar.

I’d say I basted the pork for a good 30 minutes to an hour. It was quite satisfying and smelled great. Eventually I put a piece of tinfoil on the pork and put it in a 230ish Fahrenheit oven, where I left it for a bit over 3 hours. I’d say for this particular cut of meat (and the amount of meat vs fat) 3 hours was JUST about good, though I think it could have gone for another hour and perhaps even been more tender and melt in your mouth. Melt in your mouth/tender and not at all chewy was what I was hoping for.

When I eventually took the pork belly out of the oven, it looked like this and smelled really really great:

Cooking (?) – Tare

The tare is the part of this particular soup that really gives most of the seasoning. As we’ll find out in a heartbreaking turn of events in a bit, this particular broth is tonkotsu, so it’s supposed to be very porky, thick, and rich (though as ramen_lord pointed out in the quote below, this particular mix of chicken parts and pork should have resulted in a less that INSANE amount of porky/thickness), ended up being basically like slightly porky water. So though we didn’t know it at the time, this was an important part. Lindsay made this, and it was a fairly easy process. Basically just mixing together a ton of miso paste with a few other ingredients (ginger, onion, soy sauce, sesame oil.. we skipped the tahini because the stuff we had turned out to be very very very long expired. We also added Ichimi, which is a sort of spicy seasoning/powder, but we probably could/should have added more).

Cooking (?) – Aromatic oil

This was something of a mixed success. Lindsay made the aromatic oil, and we used a combination of sesame oil, a bit of chicken fat skimmed from the top of the broth, and vegetable oil. In my opinion the ingredients were chopped up a bit too fine in the food processor (that was a bit of a point of contention between Lindsay and myself!), but the oil ended up tasting pretty good. That said, I think using something like lard (which is what was recommended) would have been better, and I think we should have made more oil then we did. It was basically oil, garlic, and ginger.

Cooking (?) – Noodles

The noodles were pretty easy to make. I’ve been making a fair amount of hand rolled pasta lately so the physical act of kneading/rolling out/cutting the pasta I’m fairly comfortable with (though it’s still a pain to knead that much dough in my opinion).

I started by baking some baking soda. I guess that increases the alkalinity and makes it more suitable for ramen noodles.

I doubled the recipe (as with everything else), and measured everything out on the kitchen scale.

Unfortunately I don’t have many photos of the rest of the noodle making process as at this point I was getting “down to the wire” and didn’t think to/care to take photos. But here is one tray of the noodles portioned out (although I would say I was a bit too generous on the portion size) and ready to cook. I made about 4 times this many noodles in total.

(fyi the all purpose flour there was just used in very very small amounts to dust the noodles to keep them from sticking)

Putting it all together – or that time I almost started crying because the broth wasn’t very porky/thick

One of the stupidest things I’ve done in recent memory is not really truly taste the tonkotsu broth until it was pretty close to time to serve it. As I mentioned, I had to stay up until 2:30AM the night before to allow the soup to cook, and at the time, I was pretty tired and just wanted to go to bed. The broth LOOKED beautiful – I wish I had a photo of it, but it looked opaque, white, beautiful. And it smelled beautiful as well. Just like I wanted. I went to bed that night feeling really really good about the broth and myself. Without having tasted it! WHAT AN IDIOT! Part of this was I think a subconscious thing. I knew that the broth hadn’t cooked long enough, or at least not as long as I had wanted, but I didn’t want to let it boil all night (which is what in retrospect I should have done almost without question).

The broth should have been thick and rich. Instead, it was porky but still watery. It didn’t taste bad, it just didn’t taste or feel like much. Honestly, tonkotsu that I’ve had in Japan was sometimes almost borderline gross it was so thick and creamy and rich. I went with the recipe I did because in theory it was supposed to be a good happy/medium tonkotsu. I think the recipe was probably great (thanks again ramen_lord for taking the time to provide such great directions!), but I think either 1. the bones I had weren’t quite right or 2. I just didn’t boil them long enough.

Anyway, when it came time to serve the ramen to my family, Lindsay came to the rescue and we ended up mixing some of the very flavorful and delicious chashu braising/cooking liquid in with the broth, and we ended up adding some of the tare in directly to the broth as well to get a better flavor. I think in the end the broth was actually pretty good, but it was much more of a miso ramen then a tonkotsu, which after all of the work I did was frankly a bit heartbreaking. First world problems. At least I’m not dying of Ebola I guess.

We cooked the noodles for each order one by one. Note in the photo that the water isn’t boiling, which I think is funny if you’ve ever seen the movie Tampopo (which I HIGHLY recommend if you are into ramen at all, or Japanese stuff) because one of the first things that the main characters notice/critique when they go into this ramen restaraunt is that the water being used to cook the noodles isn’t boiling. They say this is a bad sign. Anyway, I feel compelled to say that I realize this and that in fact the water WAS boiling most of the time, but when I took this photo I believe I was on the last (my) serving, and there wasn’t enough volume/mass of water to maintain a boil for all 9 or 10 servings I cooked in rapid succession. Anyway, I’m not sure it was a big deal this time around.

The chashu cooked, looked/was about perfect. Again, I think it could have cooked a bit longer as it wasn’t QUITE 100% melt in your mouth good, and I’m also not sure that I wouldn’t have preferred a bit more fat. Still, for a first time and for amateur ramen, I felt it was pretty good tasting (and looking!)

And finally, the finished product, which I guess you’ve already seen in the main/top image!

Overall, I was not happy how the ramen turned out, given the amount of effort I/we put into it. I think that we could have made everything from start to finish, if we had started with canned chicken stock and made some sort of miso ramen. I’m not saying it would have been good, or right, but not THAT much worse then what we did. The majority of the work was in the prepping/cooking of the bones, and a lot of the expense, and it just didn’t turn out like I wanted.

I think the ramen was pretty good though (even if not right!), and I’m at least happy for that. And I think it was a fairly authentic experience, in terms of taste, ingredients, preparation. Of course it’s not the same as eating ramen in a great hole-in-the-wall-but-line-down-the-block ramen place in Tokyo, but I don’t think you could go out to get ramen at a restaurant in my mid-sized city and get ramen that was much more real then this. So I’m proud of that at least, because a huge part of our motivation was to make something to share our love of Japan/ramen with our families.

A response from Ramen_Lord

As I mentioned, this guy is really really great, and super supportive and helpful, and he read my blog post already and responded with some feedback. Here is what he said below:

First of all, thank you for the feedback, and thank you for going on this ramen journey. Fantastic post by the way, very fun to ready I’m always very flattered when people use my recipes. And so much detail!
I’m sorry that the dish didn’t turn out quite as good as you hoped, perhaps I can try to remedy the situation. If I can say, ramen is hard. It’s incredibly hard. It’s the hardest dish a home cook can try to make. Restaurants in America are constantly failing at it. So please don’t be discouraged! There will be abject failure on the path (I have made so many horrible bowls of ramen, it’s unreal), but eventually things click and the resulting dish is wonderful.
Now… Onto the questions.
Regarding broth thickness: the miso Tonkotsu method is intentionally lighter via chicken, because the tahini and miso in the tare boost a lot of the body. That said, the amount of water you use in the boil will inevitably affect the resulting dish. If you feel the stock is too watery, especially after 12 hours of cooking, it’s best to try and boil down the stock somewhat. Evaporating moisture will inevitably help the body of the stock.
I’d say it’s NOT an ingredient issue… Your bones look right. It’s most likely a water content issue. Hardcore Tonkotsu shops barely cover the bones, meaning the concentration of fat and gelatin in the cooking water is extremely high. But with miso and tahini, it was just too much to me personally.
You can also do a few fail safe checks to confirm that the bones are fully cooked. Is the marrow mostly gone? Is the meat fully separated from the bones? This should be the case. The pot should be filled with what appear to be clean, meat free, spent bones, and a mush of overcooked, spent meat. (Be sure to stir towards the end, as this mush can burn on the bottom of the pot).
Finally, if you’re craving that incredible richness, add a trotter or two. That always helps add gelatin, which will help emulsify things and improve the body.
Also, I saw you wrote this, but you can ABSOLUTELY start the Tonkotsu overnight, at the lowest setting on your stovetop. The water, presumably reaching 170 degrees or so, will eventually pasteurize the liquid over time, so it will be entirely safe for consumption despite the low temp. Measure the temp to be sure of course. I believe you can also do this in a crock pot if you have concerns about control. Then in the morning you can ramp things back up to high boil.
Regarding the noodles: I’m actually quite surprised by this! I’ve found that at 1.5 grams the noodles definitely have that characteristic alkalinity. Another fail safe is to use filtered water instead of tap water, seems to help the flavor somewhat.
And finally… The chashu. I give a general guideline for timing but everyone has a different cut in terms of size and shape, and ultimately it comes down to texture, not time. Feel the pork belly after around 3 hours, it should be soft and very pillowy. Very little spring (though some is good). Sometimes belly is done in 2 hours, sometimes it’s done in 4. Trust your gut, cook longer if needed.
Feel free to reach out of you have other questions!

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/tonkotsu-ramen-attempt-one-not-very-porky/feed/0Barbadoshttp://www.shoelessone.com/barbados/
http://www.shoelessone.com/barbados/#respondSun, 31 May 2015 18:14:36 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=900As you may recall (I’m actually not 100% sure we talked about this on the ol’ blog), the choice to come to Barbados was based on a few things. First, we had expected that sometime in this year of travel we’d have had some opportunities to swim around in some beautiful water somewhere. India we …

]]>As you may recall (I’m actually not 100% sure we talked about this on the ol’ blog), the choice to come to Barbados was based on a few things.

First, we had expected that sometime in this year of travel we’d have had some opportunities to swim around in some beautiful water somewhere. India we figured that Goa would be this experience, but Goa was not exactly that experience, and we quickly ran into fall and winter in Asia and Europe without ever having any “go to the beach and go swimming” experiences. So, we figured on the way home we’d stop somewhere tropical.

Second, my 30th birthday was in April and I decided I’d rather be somewhere on an awesome trip then hanging out in my parents basement (although Mom/Dad, I love our basement!).

Finally, and this was a requirement and a big part of the reason we chose Barbados (which isn’t the absolute BEST Caribbean island), we wanted to find a tropical destination that wouldn’t cost us much to fly to or travel around. Lindsay ended up finding an awesome deal on a flight from Lisbon to Barbados and so Barbados it was.

The flight it turns out was cheap at least in part because it was pretty brutal in terms of the actual travel. We flew Lisbon -> London, which was a 2 hour flight or so, but we then had an almost 6 hour layover in London. Then we flew from London -> Toronto (yes, only a 5 or 6 hour drive from home!), where we had a 12 hour layover. Then we had another 4 hour flight to get to Barbados.

Turns out Toronto airport isn’t such a bad place to sleep actually. We had a nice comfortable place to lay down. It was probably one of the best airport sleeping experiences I’ve ever had actually. Which was good, because we had a nearly identical 12 hour layover in the same airport on the way home.

When we got to Barbados (eventually) we were greeted with a great, hot and humid day. We immediately started out budget minded trip by skipping the lines of taxis and walking down the nearby street to wait with some locals for a bus. One of the things that I was immediately pleasantly surprised to find was how great the people living on the island were, and how great it was to once again be able to speak english with everybody. We asked one of the ladies at the bus stop waiting with us if she knew when the next blue bus was coming. She asked where were going, and then immediately recommended taking a “reggae bus” (possible misnomer) to our destination. We did this, and found that this was a great and liberating experience. These are basically mini-vans that often play loud music.

After the bus ride and a mile walk or so we got to our AirBnB place. It was a nice apartment/duplex, and we were staying with an older German host who ran a number of AirBnB/guest houses. She was very nice (though somewhat opinionated about things like what times it was safe to go out to the beach), and I quite enjoyed talking with her. I ended up spending an afternoon helping her get her Facebook pages for her various properties setup and configured like she wanted, and she seemed very appreciative which made me feel good/useful.

We had the upstairs of this apartment nearly to ourselves. In the interest of saving money we brought something like 10 pounds of muesli from Portugal, plus a number of other small food items, including the bottle of Port I purchased in Porto. We also brought some coffee and our trusty drip coffee filter. To be honest I figured it might be a bit rediculous to bring all of the food we did but in the end I think it was an incredibly smart thing to do. A small box of junk cereal cost something like USD $5 or $6 bucks. We had enough muesli that we ate a nice full breakfast and had nice coffee for the entire 8 or 9 day period that we were on the island. I’m guessing that saved us 50+ dollars.

So, what did we do on the island besides eat muesli.

There was a fairly nice, white sand beach within a 5 minute walk from our apartment, and we spent quite a bit of time at the beach swimming and reading. It turns out that unfortunately there was some sort of algae/seaweed-raft issue in the water surrounding Barbados and so the water clarity on the beach near our house was pretty terrible. But, the water was incredibly wonderfully warm and so we spent quite a bit of time just swimming in the water and walking along the beach. Lindsay ran on the beach.

We also went to a few of the local grocery stores, including one of the bigger stores (that we took a taxi to), and we bought some various foods to cook dinner. We had fresh fish a few nights, which was surprisingly cheap and wonderfully delicious. Lindsay made jello, which was terrible.

There was this somewhat shady little area where they had food stands/huts setup that was close to our place, and we went there a number of nights to have great fried chicken and macaroni pie. The chicken was seriously so good. And it’s a pretty nice experience to be sitting there at the little counter of this dirty little food hut, while the locals (and a few tourists) are sitting around talking and drinking. I mentioned it’s a somewhat shady place with a somewhat questionable vibe, largely because it sort of felt like a place where younger local men entertained older tourist women. And also all the people trying to sell me marijuana and harder drugs. Part of the experience of course.

On my birthday I had planned a spearfishing trip. This turned out to be awesome, though full disclosure, I didn’t end up getting any fish (despite what the photo above looks like – I actually hooked this particular lion fish with a single barb through one of it’s fins but it go off). BUT, man, the spearfishing and the water was BEAUTIFUL! As I mentioned the water near our place was pretty miserable in terms of visibility, but the guy that I went spearfishing with took us to the very North West part of the Island and the water was seriously beautiful. This guy and I dove for around 3 or 4 hours, until the sun started to set, and Lindsay enjoyed the much more beautiful water to snorkel and swim and read. Despite me not getting any fish, the guy I went with got two decent sized Lionfish and he filleted them up and gave us them for dinner. On the way home he drove us to this amazing local outdoor fresh fish market and we bought a few pounds of fresh from the boat tuna and 10 flying fish fillets. Lindsay and I cooked this up when we got home and had an amazing birthday feast.

Lindsay had a great pudding pack birthday cake for me. I managed to blow out all 30 candles without any issue (almost too easy!). After the festivities (Lindsay brought me THIRTY kinder eggs for my birthday, from all around Europe, which is you know how big kinder eggs are and how her pack is, was truly an amazing thoughtful and difficult gift to give. She also bought me a VERY VERY nice Patagonia vest to replace the vest that I love very much from Alicia), we sat outside and talked. Lindsay attempted to get me to go do some hardcore 30th birthday partying, but honestly I was so incredibly sore and tired from the days freediving (it doesn’t seem like it’d be a lot of work, but it’s pretty physically and mentally exhausting) that we ended up just spending the rest of the night together on the deck talking and drinking some of my fancy 3 dollar port.

One day I heard about a website that showed what local activities were going on around the island and I found that there was a talk at a local community center in the main/only city of the island. The talk was on mental health issues on Barbados. We decided to go, because frankly after so much travel the “normal” tourist stuff like “drink rum punch and lay on the beach and go to the bar at night” thing was not so exciting. This talk ended up being probably the coolest thing we did the entire trip. We first took a mini-bus to where I THOUGHT the event was (Queen’s College or something), only to find out that there was another event (not ours) taking place there. We asked the person there how to get to the correct building and she explained the directions to us. But not 5 minutes after we started walking, some random girl in a car drove up along side us and told us that the women who had given us directions had mentioned to her that we were walking and she was going that direction anyway so she offered to give us a ride. That might be a confusing sentence, sorry. Basically, a random stranger was really really kind and found us a ride. When we got to the community center it was really an amazing thing. All of these local, normal, kind, but different people were gathered to hear this talk. The talk was pretty good, but afterwards the women who had given us the ride to the event had gone around and found us another person who was going towards our apartment to give us a ride home! We stayed a bit to socialize, and met a bunch of really nice and friendly people.

The biggest thing is I realized how much more there was to the island then just the normal tourist stuff. People really lived there, and there was a real community there. I felt very lucky to have been able to see a glimpse of this “real” part of the island, and to be among the locals in such a normal, non-touristy setting.

We did the Mount Gay Rum tour, which was OK (the rum was good, the tour was pretty tourist and boring).

A few days after the spearfishing, once we learned how great the West/North beach/water was, we spent a day taking a bus to the same area again. We met some peoples from NYC and spent a good part of the day hanging out with them and swimming/snorkeling around the water. Beautiful, warm water. Lots of tropical fish, and even some reasonably nice coral and fans.

I think the thing I’ll miss most from Barbados, and from the trip in general, is simply the number of mornings I got to sit with Lindsay, with nothing but time and new adventures in front of us, drinking our coffee and eating our muesli. Our last day of our trip, and our last day on Barbados, we did this. Luckily the sadness and feelings of loss of our adventure and travel days was tempered with our excitement to see our families. Still, I knew that last morning together was significant even if I didn’t feel the full weight of things.

The last day after breakfast we swam once more, took a shower, and headed for the airport. We had an uneventful trip to Toronto, where we spent another night in the airport, and the next day we were in Detroit by 11am. Mom picked us up and we were at home in Michigan by dinner time!

One final thing: as luck would have it, we got home on a Monday. Tuesday, the very next day, Lindsay had an interview in Chicago already at the school that she (after 4 interviews) JUST got a job at. So, it was pretty crazy. One life finished, and immediately another began.

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/barbados/feed/0The rest of Portugal!http://www.shoelessone.com/the-rest-of-portugal/
http://www.shoelessone.com/the-rest-of-portugal/#respondSun, 31 May 2015 15:00:43 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=891I’m currently sitting at my kitchen table in Michigan, Tristan and Izzy are to my left and right working on homework. We’ve been home for three weeks. I mention this because although I know it sort of ruins the whole “reading a travel blog real time” thing, I feel like my memory is already fading …

]]>I’m currently sitting at my kitchen table in Michigan, Tristan and Izzy are to my left and right working on homework. We’ve been home for three weeks. I mention this because although I know it sort of ruins the whole “reading a travel blog real time” thing, I feel like my memory is already fading and so I’m going to write as I remember things, which may not be perfect. After we left the mountain home, we headed to Porto. The drive was somewhat long, but not particularly eventful. Porto was pretty great. I think it was probably all of our favorite city in Portugal. It felt touristy, but perhaps also a bit more casual and a bit more approachable then Lisbon.

We stayed in a really cool little apartment. I wish I had photos, but it was sort of an artsy place. Three floors, with lots of random art from India and SE Asia. The couple that owned the house were very very sweet and saved us a parking spot directly in front of the apartment with their giant postal delivery van. We stayed in Porto for a total of 3 days.

The first day we spent walking around the city and we went out and had a great meal at a great restaurant where we had some spectacular seafood, including paella, which Lindsay and I had been holding out on to wait for her parents to arrive. The next day we did a walking tour of the city. It was one of these “free with tips” tours that, well, is free with tips. It was pretty good, and we spent roughly 3 or 4 hours walking around the city and learning about the history of the city as well as the history of Portugal in general. Highlights (for me at least) would included looking over the Douro river at all of the beautiful red brick roofs, learning about the tiles and paintings in the cities main train station (beautiful tile work on all of the walls), and also visiting the bookstore “Lello & Irmão” – which is this bookstore that apparently J.K. Rowling based parts of Harry Potter on.

After the tour we went and had very great sandwich called a Francesinha. This particular sandwich is basically a bunch of meat in between two pieces of white bread, with a ton of cheese melted on the top, cooked in a pizza oven. They serve it with this tomato sauce on top of the sandwich. It was perhaps not my favorite thing I ate on this trip, but in Portugal it was probably near the top. The next day, which was probably my favorite day in Porto, we walked for hours and hours around the city, eventually crossing the Douro river and going port wine tasting. This was great because it turns out I actually like port wines. For anybody who doesn’t know, port wines are (generally) very sweet, with a higher alcohol content. So we walked up and down hills to visit three different wineries. They were all beautiful. One of them had a nice outdoor garden we sat in while chickens ran around us. I ended up buying a bottle of Porto port wine that I brought with us to Barbados, for like 3 bucks. I’m glad I did this because although I often think “oh, I can just buy this when I get to ______”, the reality I’ve found while traveling is that this is perhaps obviously not normally true. Again, I realize this is obvious, but for example, I SWEAR I’ve seen “One Cup” sake sold in the US all over the place. In fact, I thought I had seen it sold old over the world. But I think that this was just something I was imagining to be true when I was in Japan because I have only seen One Cup sake once since leaving Japan. Anyway, I digress! After Porto we headed back to Lisbon where we had a very busy last day. We ended up spending most of the last part of the day at Sintra castle. Sintra is a castle that was design and built for entertaining. They also refer to it as the “fairytale” castle because it looks like something you might see in a Disney movie. Lots of bright colors and fancy columns. The castle was pretty cool I’d say, but honestly the fact that it was basically built for the sake of being a fairytale looking castle made the experience a bit less cool for me. I’d choose a “real” castle that is perhaps not quite as beautiful over a fake castle any day. Still, there were a bunch of really beautiful views of the area, and the drive too/from the castle and the surrounding area was green and beautiful enough that the trip was well worth it. If I was to do it again, I’d probably skip the castle and instead just walk/drive around the city. After the castle we headed to a different part of Lisbon along the coast (whose name escapes me). It was Lisbon, but felt a bit like Southern California or something. Lots of fancier little stores, people out running, beaches. We didn’t do much here, just walked around and enjoyed the beautiful weather. Eventually we made our way back to Lisbon where we had dinner at Time Out Lisbon, which is this giant and very nice/modern/fancy food hall. After this we drove the Teeples to the airport and they were on their way back home! We stayed for a few more nights in Lisbon. The first night we stayed at this very nice couples apartment. One of them was from Florida (Jessica?) and the other was from Portugal (Pablo?). They met in Colombia, so we had quite a bit to talk about. We ended up staying up until almost 3 AM chatting with them. Great people. Turns out the guy was a Tuna, which is a group of guys that, as far as I can understand, basically get together and play serenades for their girlfriends. It’s a university group actually, but it’s a pretty serious thing. The guy was really into the music and the group in general – he had actually started the Tuna group at his university and seemed to be somewhat of a big deal. When he described the group it seemed like they were basically just singing to their girlfriends and drinking in university, but then he showed me a bunch of youtube videos where his club was playing in HUGE theaters with thousands of people watching. It was pretty crazy.

The next day we had to move AirBnB places and went to our last and final AirBnB in Europe. It was in a bit of a strange place out of the way of the more touristy parts of Lisbon which turned out to be awesome. We found a pretty great little pop-up food truck type area/sqaure. I’m doing a poor job describing it, hopefully we can put some photos here to show it. Nothing too fancy, just a little square area with a bunch of small food huts/vendors around selling somewhat reasonably priced food. There was also a speaker system there and a bunch of people dancing during the day. A nice play to sit out and drink a beer and eat some pizza and people watch. It actually reminded me a lot of Oakland. I think Lindsay and I both agreed that if we could find a place like this in whichever city we ended up living in we’d be very happy and content.

We also returned the rental car we had been using. There was a bit of bumper damage to the car and we had to deal with that, but it turned out not to be a big deal. Somehow, they gave us a repair quote within 5 minutes of bringing the car in. I guess they just have standard pricing for everything. The next morning we took our final European mass transit ride to the airport.

At this point, things were getting “real” in terms of realizing that our trip was really coming to and end. Even still, I can’t say there was one single point where I felt like, “wow. This is all done.” This is actually quite sad for me to be honest. To this very day (we’ve now been home for a month!) I haven’t felt this way. In a way this is good. Sometimes in the past I’ve felt like I’ve been in the depths of despair or melancholy, thinking back with significance about all that we’d seen or done on some trip. On this particular trip I had been getting little sips of this feeling for months as I realized things were slowly coming to an end. Still, we had another 10 days or so left in our trip (more time than many people get in one single vacation in a lifetime!). We got to the airport 2 or 3 hours early and started our (long) trip to Barbados.

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/the-rest-of-portugal/feed/0Fatima, Grândola + Covilha (Serra de Estrella).http://www.shoelessone.com/fatima-grandola-covilha-serra-de-estrella/
http://www.shoelessone.com/fatima-grandola-covilha-serra-de-estrella/#respondSun, 19 Apr 2015 12:37:39 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=874When my parents first got to Lisbon, we really had very little in the way of concrete plans set for the next 2 weeks. Initially, my mom and I planned to take the brunt of it, and the she got really busy with school and passed the task to me, and then I, knowing my …

]]>When my parents first got to Lisbon, we really had very little in the way of concrete plans set for the next 2 weeks. Initially, my mom and I planned to take the brunt of it, and the she got really busy with school and passed the task to me, and then I, knowing my lovely mother would want more input than she cared to admit, decided we would just “play it by ear” and plan as we went. That turned out to be a great idea, as it was that mentality that led us here. Originally, in our basic sketch of the trip, the plan was to head north and then take on the south, lounging on the beaches just before they arrived back home. Thankfully, our lack of concrete planning gave us the mobility to look at the weather, head south first and on our way up to Porto, stop in Serra de Estrella. It was my mom’s suggestion, and it turned out to be a highlight of the trip for all of us.

When we left Sagres, we took the back roads north, following our gps with limited success through beautiful farms, and ultimately, cork forests. The trees were BEAUTIFUL and made me really happy we had opted for a car rental instead of trying to take public transportation, as we were able to dictate our path by the scenery, and not necessarily the quickest route. We had decided to drive 3 hours (which took us almost 4.5) that night after recognizing an Easter morning/mass, and a hike around Sagres would leave much of the day depleted for getting to our next destination. We ended up staying in this little rustic farmhouse in the middle of a very rural area south of Lisbon by about 2 hours. We were tired, and not expecting much from our stay as it was simply meant to be a stopping point before our journey the next day, but once again, the people of Portugal showed their true colors and made our stay quite memorable.

As I mentioned, Google maps seemed to be bugging out for some reason, and while it got us CLOSE to our final destination, we couldn’t find it. The “address” had no numbers (not google’s fault!) and after driving around in circles for a bit, we ended up calling our host who came with her dad (who spoke no English) to pick us up. Minutes after walking in the door, she was back donned with beers and sparkling soda. She had left fruit and snacks and overall, just made the place feel really warm. We stayed up for a few hours, calling the boys to wish them a happy easter and hear about the delicious feast they had cooked up for themselves (while we ate kettle chips, cheap (yet delicious!) wine I had picked up from Aldi, beer and cheese), checked in on my grandpa, who had just had his 2nd knee surgery, and called to leave a message with my Aunt Lisa who was scheduled for major surgery the next day. The next morning after showers and coffee, we decided to head out. My dad really wanted to say goodbye to our hosts before we left to thank them for the great stay. We ended up talking (through translation from his daughter) with the man for almost 40 minutes, and were given a bottle of Moscato as a gift from him as we were leaving. Again, unbelievably thankful for his kindness and warmed yet again by the Portuguese, we were on our way.

Driving north, we decided to stop at Fatima for a few hours because it was something my dad really wanted to see. It was not quite what I expected, but it was quite well organized complete with a walking “Pilgrim tour” which led us around the compound, to a museum, various sanctuaries, a church and a candle prayer station. We stopped for lunch (one of the best we had had yet on the trip) and had traditional Portuguese grub – my parents some sort of creamy beef with mushrooms and fries, Kevin and I something akin to Grandma’s pot roast and another pork dish, which we split. On the road again, we headed a bit east as we prepared to climb Serra de Estrella with our 4 cyl. Toyota Yaris.

Fatima.

When I put in the address for our next location, I will admit, I didn’t do great work. Over the course of the last 8 months, the importance of double checking the location and confirming with the Airbnb map had become abundantly clear, as there were multiple times on this trip when the two locations were literally miles (if not hours) away from each other…and yet…I knew better, but I simply dropped the address in anyway, and off we went. Up, and up and up and up we went. Winding around crazy corners, making jack-hammered 210 degree turns up the mountain as oncoming traffic zoomed upwards, we (in the back seat anyway) were all pretty much scared shitless, not only that our car would literally not make it up, but also that my dad (who honestly did a spectacular job of driving the entire time) was going to run us off the road gesturing like crazy at the beauty surrounding us. It truly was a spectacular, spectacular drive (despite my mom inhaling sharply and gripping the back seat every 20 seconds, scaring me half to death). After almost an hour of driving (what felt like) only UP, we finally made it to our stop, only to walk in and learn we were an entire mountain range OVER.

Yup.

So off we went, yet again, this time going down, down, down – only to (again!) go up, up, UP. Only this time, it was getting dark and we had virtually no cellphone signal in the mountain range.

Not that I was ever TOO concerned (no surprise there, right?), although I did feel quite bad about the whole thing, we finally pulled into our not-so-humble-castle-like-abode with dark skies and nothing but stars above us about an hour later. You know, you look at photos of the place online, but really nothing can translate just how cool (or lame) something is until you actually see it for yourself. It turns out, this place was incredible and right out of a storybook. Unfortunately, due to my mistake, our host had to leave to take care of business in the next town over and had to drive back to meet us about an hour later. He told us where to find the key and to “make ourselves comfortable” in the giant cave/castle that was all for us. We opened a bottle of wine we had and some crackers and waited for him to come back. After a bit, he came back and after apologizing a great deal for our tardiness, we unloaded our stuff and were given a tour around the place. Again, it was awesome. Apparently various Portuguese writers had holed themselves away here using the space to write novels and poetry, which was not surprising if you saw just how inspiring this place was. He had made this (really strong yet) amazing cheese for us and left another bottle of wine for us to enjoy, and was on his way. We stayed up, snacking on anchovies, cheese and pasta (which we had picked up from Lidl a few hours before). It was a great night.

We woke up the next morning and decided to have the breakfast he offered us the night before with a German couple who were staying in a much smaller house below us (which sadly, I seem to have no photos of!). We feasted on local cheese and sesame crackers with honey. 4 types of breads, homemade jams, 2 different types of amazing tea, coffee and an egg dish made by the chickens living on the estate. We talked and talked to the German couple and had a really perfect morning. After breakfast, we checked out where they were staying – which was WAY smaller but AMAZING. Their place had access to one of the natural pools cascading down through the valley that you could only get into from inside the house. It was awesome.

After breakfast and our tour, we decided to go hike around and explore our surroundings. We ended up hiking down to the valley and spent the afternoon jumping rock to rock and swimming in the frigid mountain water. Kev was the first in (no surprise there) but my dad quickly followed. I didn’t post pics of him in the water, as I’m sure I’d never hear the end of it. My mom read while my dad napped and Kevin and I explored and played cards on the flat rocks. Not to be outdone by the boys, I stripped down and jumped in the freezing water too (if only for a few seconds). It was a perfect afternoon. Hiking back up the hill, we found a geo-cache (my dad did :)) and headed back for some reading by the fire, lengthy conversations about how to streamline my dad’s technology usage in his office and drink the Moscato from our previous host. All in all, Covilha and Serra de Estrella turned out to be an unexpected highlight for all of us, and one we would have never had had we planned our trip out before we came.

Mom testing out the Moscato.Morning reading by the fire.

Hiking.Posin’.Showing how tough he is. Dorky family photo.Geo-caching!

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/fatima-grandola-covilha-serra-de-estrella/feed/0The Algarve.http://www.shoelessone.com/the-algarve/
http://www.shoelessone.com/the-algarve/#respondSun, 19 Apr 2015 01:32:33 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=868After a few days in the country, we headed to the Algarve, specifically, Lagos + Sagres. The city of Lagos was quite small and it was great for easy exploring. My parents went to the fish market, my dad waking up around 6 am one day headed down to pick out some delicious tuna for …

]]>After a few days in the country, we headed to the Algarve, specifically, Lagos + Sagres. The city of Lagos was quite small and it was great for easy exploring. My parents went to the fish market, my dad waking up around 6 am one day headed down to pick out some delicious tuna for us for dinner. We celebrated Easter (Kev and i standing the entire mass from the balcony, my parents sitting at the alter) and found about 15 items wrapped in tissue paper hiding in various places around the house. We had a gin + tonic tasting event, “sponsored” by Kevin, who claimed (and was correct, sadly!) that given the chance to have 4 drinks, we couldn’t tell the difference between them. We went sea kayaking and swam in the beach. We went hat hunting for my mom (which turned out to be quite a feat!), and ate a delicious Indian dinner. My dad tried gelato for the first time, and they ate their first salted sardines (another Portuguese specialty). We ran on the beach, looked at cool urchins, played paddle ball while Kev practiced his card trick. We went to Sagres and ultimately to “the end of the world!” aka, the south-eastern most tip of Europe. We geo-cached and ate egg salad sandwiches and chocolate seashells on the side of the road. Needless to say, we killed it.

Looking like a gem, Easter morning.Easter cake with hazelnuts and figs made by a sweet Portuguese woman.Dinner one night.When my mom visited Portugal almost 30 years ago, she remembered rocky cliffs and beautiful water somewhere around Lagos. She and my Aunt Renee camped, and it turns out, there was a campsite that they very well could have stayed at right by this beach. We’ll never know for sure (until we scan some of my aunt’s old photos for proof!) but this very well could have been where she was all those years ago. I thought that was pretty cool.Super woman.Dad running on the beach.This is my favorite picture of the day, even though it’s not a great one. Judging by the look on my mom’s face, you would have thought THE BIGGEST WAVE ON THE PLANET (or a giant sea animal) had just come out of no where and attacked. Comically for her, I captured that monster, which you can see rising just above her ankles. Love it.Sea kayaking.Dad, being funny.The End of the World (Sagres).

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/the-algarve/feed/0Foupana + Tavira (Ihla de Tavira).http://www.shoelessone.com/foupana-tavira-ihla-de-tavira/
http://www.shoelessone.com/foupana-tavira-ihla-de-tavira/#respondSun, 19 Apr 2015 01:00:04 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=863So, we drove south. Our ultimate destination was a little city called Tavira, and more specially, a tiny island off the coast called Ihla de Tavira. The plan for my exhausted parents, after weeks of preparing for this trip, was to chill out on the coast for a while, run on the beach, read a …

]]>So, we drove south. Our ultimate destination was a little city called Tavira, and more specially, a tiny island off the coast called Ihla de Tavira. The plan for my exhausted parents, after weeks of preparing for this trip, was to chill out on the coast for a while, run on the beach, read a book, and relax. Knowing that we were going to be on the beach for the next few days, we opted to check out the Portuguese countryside, and man, what a great decision that was. We literally were in the middle of NO WHERE, or at least it felt like it, and it was a total change of pace from the busy city. We stayed in this amazing log cabin, were greeted by the world’s biggest dogs, and chilled out on the giant porch overlooking the desert-esque landscape. It was pretty cool.

Dad pouring gin + tonics The first night there, we decided to have a shrimp-grill-fest. Below, our master griller (who worked pretty hard to get that thing going!)Feast.Mom did some yoga.And overall, life was pretty swell.The next morning, we packed a lunch of sandwiches and cold beers, and headed to Tavira, to do just as I said earlier…chill. We took a tiny ferry (for 1.60 round trip!) to the island that was jammed packed with tons of people also opting for a beach day. Dad ran. Kev napped (if you can believe it!). Mom read. I looked for sea treasures. It was another A+ day.

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/foupana-tavira-ihla-de-tavira/feed/0Lisbon.http://www.shoelessone.com/lisbon-tavira/
http://www.shoelessone.com/lisbon-tavira/#respondSun, 19 Apr 2015 00:42:24 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=858So, needless to say, we were pretty excited that my parents were coming to visit. We ended up coming in to Lisbon via bus around 11pm the night before their arrival, and were picked up by the world’s most hospitable host (yet another Airbnb success story). Right off the bat, we were feeling quite spoiled, …

]]>So, needless to say, we were pretty excited that my parents were coming to visit. We ended up coming in to Lisbon via bus around 11pm the night before their arrival, and were picked up by the world’s most hospitable host (yet another Airbnb success story). Right off the bat, we were feeling quite spoiled, as it has not been the norm for us to have someone PICK US UP from anywhere, let alone in a car. Normally we’d be dealing with following our GPS god-knows-where and walking normally 1-4ish km from our stop to our place with our packs in whatever city it was that we happened to land. The fact that we had a real, live person meeting us to ease our transition into Lisbon was pretty damn awesome to say the least, especially after the 8+ hour bus ride in the back of a giant, bumpy bus with no air. On top of him being just a really wonderfully warm person, he also bought us dinner after explaining that he remembered “how difficult it was, traveling in the past, when [you’d] get somewhere late, and were starving and everything was closed…. ” Honestly, if there could have been a more perfect way to enter a new city, bellies full, warmed with the kindness of this man who we were only paying $22 per night to stay with, well, I don’t know what it would have looked like other than this.

We fell asleep around 1 and woke up early to walk a few miles to the metro to buy cheaper public transit fares for my parents when we planned to pick them up from the airport later that afternoon. Walking back, we stopped at this great little coffee shop on the corner which only sat about 4 people, and fumbled through various greetings and pleasantries with the guy behind the counter. Shaky hands, and caffeine ripping through our veins, we headed back, packed up our stuff and walked a few kms up some ridiculous hills in the heat to find our bus to take us to the place we’d be staying at for the next 3 days.

Hopping off the bus, we were pretty excited about the neighborhood. We stayed in Barrio Alto, known for it’s music and late-night party scene (not that we did much of that :)), which was full of cobbled streets, street musicians and great pasties de nata (local sweet treat) shops galore. We walked down the street, took in the beauty of the city, and stopped by a diner on the corner where we had a few beers (at like 10 am) and ate some grub. The sun was shining and it was hot and the beers, despite the hour, hit the spot. Shortly after, we hopped on the metro, and headed for the airport!

After picking up my parents, the rest of the day was kind of a blur. We hopped back on the metro for home and climbed the 4 flights of stairs carrying their bags, and enjoyed a few small treats (Palm Sunday baskets, we called them :)), we had brought for them from Italy, France and Spain. They were exhausted and jet-lagged, and while they tried their best to stay awake, they cashed out for a few hours. When they woke up, the sun had set, but we walked around and checked out the neighborhood. We had dinner (me, squid, Dad – octopus, Mom and kKev – cod) and tried the cherry ginja (a Portuguese liquor made by infusing ginja berries in alcohol and adding sugar) from chocolate cups, and came back to watch/listen to Kyle’s basketball game, as his Godwin students were playing for the finals. After their big win, we all went to bed for the night.

The next few days, well, we hit it pretty hard. We walked and walked and walked (nothing out of the norm for us, but my parents were pretty hardcore and hung with us!). We walked to the National monument square, checked out the beach, walked to the Tower of Belem, ate pasties de Belem, ate a bunch of delicious food, and then walked some more. It was pretty great.

Pasties de nata.The streets all over Portugal were paved in this insanely awesome black/white patterned cobblestone. The patterns changed, but the beauty never did. My mom was especially impressed by this, and decided she wanted her own piece to take home, as you can see below.Tower of Belem.

Day 2, my parents did a tour with “We Hate Tourism, Tours” and met these great people from Germany who were in Portugal because they were planning a bike trip from the south of Portugal into Spain. My parents really hit it off with them, and we randomly ended up meeting them at this really cool little brothel-turned-bar for fancy gin and tonics and “green wine” – another Portugal specialty. After our drinks we headed to this great tapas bar where it just so happened there was a Poetry slam – so we sat, not understanding a word – listening as person after person poured their hearts out on stage. It was a pretty cool experience. I don’t have any pics of either thing, but was definitely a night to remember.

On our last day, we walked around a few more neighborhoods, ate bifana sandwiches and just enjoyed Lisbon.

The next morning, we picked up our rental car for the rest of our trip, and were off! We made a quick pit-stop at the amazing sports store, Decathlon, and then to IKEA because, well, Kev can’t go past one with needing to stop, and then headed south to our next destination, Foupana, as a way to Tavira and Ihla de Tavira!

]]>http://www.shoelessone.com/lisbon-tavira/feed/0Spainhttp://www.shoelessone.com/spain/
http://www.shoelessone.com/spain/#respondSat, 18 Apr 2015 23:09:50 +0000http://www.shoelessone.com/?p=842Well, my last blog post left off with us on the train, on our way to Barcelona. It was an update-to-the-minute blog post. I don’t think this makes sense, but I think perhaps I got too close to the sun. My wax blogging wings fell apart. Also, I might mention that a certain somebody I …

]]>Well, my last blog post left off with us on the train, on our way to Barcelona. It was an update-to-the-minute blog post. I don’t think this makes sense, but I think perhaps I got too close to the sun. My wax blogging wings fell apart. Also, I might mention that a certain somebody I may or may not be traveling with/married to hasn’t been pulling her blogging weight lately. Regardless, as I type this Spain blog post, I am nearly done with PORTUGAL. But, I want to write a few things about Spain before I forget them! So, here we go.

First stop, Barcelona

I’m not exactly sure how to describe what I expected from Spain, in particular the big cities like Barcelona, but I think I was expecting something like a city in a desert, hot, totally dead during the day, with lots of clubbing at 5 AM (which I’m too lame currently to wake up for). I was picturing a city (or even country!) that basically revolved around going to a club, and sleeping all day long.

I’m still not sure that this might not be part of the reality, but Barcelona turned out to be one of my top 10 cities EASILY in this entire trip. I’d say it was also my favorite city in Spain.

I have been having an extremely difficult time comparing one city to another at this point in our travels (this has been something that’s really bothered me lately actually – I feel like every city we visit feels so different from every other city we’ve been too, but I know there are lots of similarities!). I’d say that it feels like a very very friendly city, easy to use. The prices are good, the people are all very friendly, and a HUGE bonus is that Lindsay and I at least speak a little Spanish (much more than any other language we’ve been around).

We originally planned on staying only two nights in Barcelona, but after the first day we immediately realized we wanted to stay longer. Our AirBnB host ended up having availability, and we ended up staying for FIVE nights! Our host was great (Ivan), friendly, etc.

The day we arrived we walked around. No big surprise there. The city felt very “cute”, at least the main downtown sort of tourist area. There are a few main streets that are very touristy/shoppy and basically just have all of the main shops on it *H&M, Intimissimi, etc, etc), but then once you leave the main streets and get to other areas there are the “cute” areas that include cheap little restaurants, little cafes and bars, galleries, etc. Just really pleasant. I’d sort of describe it as Amsterdam meets Tokyo meets Ikea. I think that somehow fits, even if it doesn’t give a clear picture (sorry!).

Part of the reason we loved Barcelona was because of the weather and the general vibe. When we got to Barcelona, things were really starting to get nice weather wise. Street musicians were out on many corners for really the first time on this trip. There is this guy, Gaudi, who did a lot of different interesting things with the architecture and it seems to really show up in a lot of places. I think it’s cool. Sort of like, for nerds, a Zerg type influence on the city, some buildings looking pretty organic and even alien.

Here, if you haven’t read yet, Lindsay decided to run a marathon. I won’t bother telling the story again, other than to say I was and am quite impressed with Lindsay for managing to run a marathon with essentially no training, and having eaten to being stuffed a giant sushi all-you-can-eat buffet the evening before.

Here is one of many plates from Lindsay’s pre-marathon meal:

During the marathon I actually had a very nice and productive day. First, I walked up a bunch of stairs to an art museum of some sort that overlooked the city.

I could see the race start/finish from there

Then I went and had a nice breakfast including a somewhat interesting Coca Cola choclate product, which seems popular in Spain but I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I really like the sort of retro label. Not seen is the fact that as I was eating my not super healthy breakfast, I had the opportunity to watch the professional marathon runners fly past me.

Then, to continue the beautiful day I went to the Barcelona Beer Festival! I didn’t even know this thing was happening but our host told us about it, so I was pretty happy. They had a bunch of beers, including *Founders* from Grand Rapids. I found this sort of funny, considering Founders used to be something of a Microbrew but now it seems to be everywhere (we even saw it in a grocery store in France).

Here are some of the Founders people

The venue was quite nice I’d say – it was actually in part of a maritime museum.

So, again, more about the run in Lindsay’s blog post, but basically after the run Lindsay went home and slept, then we explored the city a bit. Which is basically what we did the next few days.

A number of highlights (relevant to all of Spain) include the flan that is everywhere (in the super market for super cheap, in cafes, bars, restaurants, etc)

And tapas. Tapas, at least to the few tapas places I’ve been in the US, seemed mainly like small plates of fancy food. The difference in Spain, at least with our budget, is that the small plates are often not that fancy. But, the small plates are also pretty cheap! Lots of fried food, lots of chorizo (which is different/better than most of the stuff I’ve had in the US before), lots of olives.

Here some different type/style of chorizo, which we found most often

One night it rained really hard and Lindsay and I went into a bar/cafe to take cover and a Barcelona game was on, which was pretty awesome. I drank a beer, ate flan, and Lindsay drank Pastis, and we learned about how awesome the footballer Messi is.

We went into a bunch of cathedrals and one of them let you (for 3 euros) get on top of the roof, which was pretty cool, despite the boring photo.

Barcelona was a lot of fun to explore. I felt like people were very friendly, and as I may or may not have mentioned earlier (I’m writing this post over several days, sadly) we are able to speak enough Spanish to sort of communicate/understand what things say, which adds to the fun.

Walking somewhere one day, in a less touristy area, we found a guy that made some really amazing (and cheap! Maybe 1-2 euros each?) empenadas. The food wasn’t THAT exciting, but it was a pretty typical interaction on this trip through Spain, and pretty great. We sit down, we speak some broken spanish to a really nice guy. We look at a menu. We aren’t 100% sure what we are ordering. We ask some question in really broken Spanish. The guy is happy to talk with us, and we “talk” for a few minutes. The place had pictures on the wall, I believe they looked like they were painted by the guy perhaps, and I think they all featured cats. You can sort of see them in the background (though not well):

We went to this park (it took us all day to walk there I think). It was free to get in, but let me tell YOU, we almost didn’t go because it sort of look like you had to pay to get in, but you actually only had to pay to go to a special part of the park. It felt a bit like Disneyland.

Another food related photo (Lindsay just asked me if I was just posting food photos again, and I didn’t think I was, but then went I went through the photos I’ve posted so far in this blog post they are sure enough mostly food. Sorry future self, and everybody else!):

What you are looking at in the above photo is MASTER CRUMBLE muesli with milk. I may have mentioned this in another blog post, but at one point I was carrying 5 x 750g bags of master crumble in my pack. That’s ~8.25 lbs of muesli, which is a considerable amount imo. Anyway, it’s become one of my favorite foods and gimmicks of this entire trip. (Spoiler alert: I’m currently in the airport in London and still have 3 bags of Master Crumble left!).

Anyway, I drank some beer

And we went to a bunch of cool indoor markets (where we bought nothing)

Also, in the tapas category, I think, are these sandwiches called “bikinis” which are in my opinion terrible

Oh! And, one of the most interesting (for me) food related things on the trip are these hams you can buy:

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Apparently, it’s quite common for a family to have one of these legs in their kitchen. They cut slices off for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, etc, etc. Anyway, we went to this place (with the legs pictured above) and I had my first Moritz beer, which was awesome I thought. I LOVE that in Spain (and Portugal, for that matter) they sell these mini little beers that are like 20cl. It’s a great beer size, because you can have two of them without feeling anything, but it’s like you drank two beers, which is fun because I like opening beer bottles because it seems cool. Anyway, after this discovery my shopping habits changed from just pudding/flan to pudding/flan/tiny Moritz beers:

We eventually left Barcelona and headed to a city called Granada.

Granada

We went to Granada largely because of a friends recommendation. It turns out that it was a very good recommendation! We stayed in a hostel-ish guest house sort of, which was nice enough. One thing that I found strange was that there were at any given time a family of 4, plus 2 or 3 sets of guests staying in this place, and one bathroom which isn’t so crazy, but there was no lock on the bathroom door, which I found strange. One very nice bonus was that the apartment had a nice room that you could climb up and look over the old city on.

For whatever reason we don’t have many photos from Granada, but here is a view from somewhere on a hill:

Granada is an old city, and the Moors used to live here and built a lot of the city. So there were a lot of Islamic touristy things (“Get your name written in Arabic letters”, etc). We went to a few tapas place, including this awesome place that gave you a free tapa with each beer you purchased (and the beers were cheap, 2 euros or less I’d say).

One of the “big things” to do in Granada is going to this palace called Alhambra. It’s a bit tough to describe, and once again we didn’t take many photos (this time because Lindsay’s camera died), but basically it’s a very large garden (actually it was more like a bunch of very large gardens) and a very beautiful Arabic palace.

To be honest these photos are not even close to starting to show what Alhambra is all about, so check out Google image search if you want to see more/better photos.

Other than this, Lindsay and I walked around Granada a bunch.

Next up was…

Malaga

In Malaga we stayed at what I would say was one of our nicer AirBnB places – it was a studio I suppose, but had a really nice big balcony, a well equipped kitchen, and it was nice and modern and clean. To be honest where we stay doesn’t matter THAT much, but when you travel for a while it’s nice to have a place that you feel really comfortable coming home to, that’s warm and cozy. Lindsay and I did a bunch of stuff in Malaga but on top of the normal, outdoorsy stuff, we Also spent a decent chunk of time watching Star Wars (we were attempting to watch 1 through 6).

Anyway, here is a view from our balcony one day when something related to Easter was happening at the cathedral next door:

and here is a photo of me drinking a beer on said porch, before I knew that something related to church was happening (I figured perhaps there was somebody going to give a speech or something?)

We went to a couple of cool cathedrals

and walked to the beach (along the way they had this cool art/architecture/whatever thing)

This particular beach hand this breakwall area that had literally 20 to 30 cats on it. I’m not sure what the deal is with all of the cats, but I do know that the wall smelled badly of cat piss.

One night a friend we met in Naples (which seems like ages ago) – Shannon – came to Malaga to hang out with her friend Louise and that was a very nice time. It’s always nice to get a chance to meet/hang out with people you’ve met. I think that Shannon is something of a kindred spirit and Lindsay and her got on quite well I’d say.

Lindsay and I also went to a wine museum. Unfortunately the museum was under construction, but they let us view some of the old labels and artifacts that were still accessible for free, which was nice. We also tried a few wines and ended up buying a bottle of wine as a “welcome to Portugal” gift for Lindsay’s parents. You might notice that we were in Spain, not Portugal, and that meant that we (I) had to carry this wine for the rest of our trip until we met up with Lindsay’s parents in a week or two’s time.

Along the way we also picked up 3 x 750g bags of Master Crumble muesli, a large bottle of Pastis, and I don’t even know what else. My bag was very heavy.

We went to the bus station to buy tickets on the last day. The Alsa Bus company was pretty expensive, but had a nice kiosk that you could use to purchase tickets without having to wait in line or print them online.

Eventually, after eating many tapas, we moved onto our final city, Seville.

Sevilla

Seville was another city that was highly recommended by Shannon, and it was a close second place in terms of “favorite cities in Spain.” It was a large city, and once again we had a really great AirBnB place.

We ate a lot of sandwiches and puddings in Sevilla.

No desk in our room though

We walked to this cool art/sculpture thing one day. Apparently you can pay 4 euros or something and get to the top of the thing, and on top of that you get a free drink. We weren’t exactly sure where to go (for future reference: the basement) so walked into this tent that had a line that was selling tickets for 4 euros. The sign said “taquilla” and I thought, “oh, cool, perhaps this is sponsored by some liquor company.” It turns out that taquilla is actually Spanish for “Ticket Office” and we actually ended up in some Jesus/Church/Easter related movie thing that was basically just a video montage of different statues of Jesus and Marry (etc). I wasn’t too excited about this, but oh well.

Seville was a really cool city. We walked all over (nothing new) and ended up at this very old/cool Moorish building/water thing.

Nearby there was a really really awesome park/garden (free!) that we walked around for a while.

I also went to this castle called Alcázar. Lindsay didn’t care about coming, but I was SUPER excited because it’s where Season 5 of Game of Thrones was shot (at least the parts that take place in Dorne).

This place was really really incredible, and frankly photos don’t do it justice. But here are a ton of them anyway

This was sort of our last stop in our trip in Europe before we left our “normal” travel and met up with Lindsay’s parents, John and Sue. We spent a bit of time talking about this, but it didn’t quite sink in (and still hasn’t!).

Next stop was the bus station, where we had a 14 hour bus trip to get to Lisboa, Portugal!